Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (Faber, £10.99)
“Bones can speak long after the flesh has gone.” Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut is an exploration of the power of silence as a means of resistance, a way of carving space for the self in a hostile world. Rooted in Black feminist thinking, the poems have a clear-eyed elegance, buttressed with a controlled ferocity that is acute on the damage done by institutional blankness, and how it forces an uncomfortable conformity: “They were too happy / to realise they were poster girls / for the effacement of themselves.” Bulley, a former Barbican Young Poet and poet-in-residence at the V&A Museum, achieves a tone both delicate and strong, studded with moments that catch the breath: “if your pain is alive in me / so too must be your joy”. With a generous and interrogative spirit, Quiet marks the arrival of a major poetic talent.
More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry, edited by Kayo Chingonyi (Canongate, £16.99)
In this companion anthology to 1998’s The Fire People, a crucial landmark in documenting the work of Black British poets, Chingonyi has sought “poems which vibrate across a spectrum of Black British aesthetics broadly conceived”. His 34 selected writers include familiar names such as Warsan Shire, TS Eliot prize winner Roger Robinson and Malika Booker, plus emerging talents such as Kandace Siobhan Walker and Belinda Zhawi. Particularly striking is the work of Samatar Elmi, whose plangent lyrics disguise a sharp bite: “Albion, as in purgatory, or perhaps / an oasis, or mirages in the sand, / which is itself the cruellest state in limbo”. Balancing the traditional and the radical, this is a strikingly rich set of poems, and a joyous testament to community.
The Lascaux Notebooks by Jean-Luc Champerret, edited and translated by Philip Terry (Carcanet, £19.99)
The conceit behind this collection of “ice age poetry” is that in 1940 the French resistance sent Jean-Luc Champerret, a little-known poet, on a mission to the recently discovered Lascaux caves. Noting down the scrawls on the walls, Champerret realised they could become poems: if a group of vertical lines were taken to represent a forest, the rain, or spears, then these symbols could be arranged to generate poems in a proto-Oulipian process. Decades later, the results of his experiments were fortuitously recovered from a crate. The book presents a plausible, imagistic recreation of prehistoric living, its quieter moments and dangers, especially when bison are roaming: “We crouch behind the cover of the trees / watching their every step / burning inside with fear”. It’s slyly playful throughout: “To say I have eaten / the fruit that / you were keeping in the hut // you will have to / make do with / roots when you break fast // eating the fruit / I thought / how delicious how cold”.
Continuous Creation by Les Murray (Carcanet, £11.99)
“I think I’ve got about three-quarters of a new book ready,” Murray told his agent five months before he died in 2019. Those completed poems, found in a folder on his desk, along with 17 handwritten drafts, form his final collection. Unsurprisingly, a sense of the end infuses the book, leavened by his characteristically sharp wit, pitch-perfect attention to the sound of language, and love for the Australian countryside and its hard-won beauties. There is an obvious difference in polish between the drafts and the finalised poems, the latter honed until they glint with cool and meticulous insight. Despite this imbalance, the book is a fine farewell to a poet who stuck true to his singular vision: “We bring nothing into this world / except our gradual ability / to create it, out of all that vanishes / and all that will outlast us.”
• Rishi Dastidar is co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair)
